Bakr free as a bird

According to the docket in the United States Federal Courthouse here, the file has been listed as ‘closed’.

Bakr was wanted along with fellow Jamaat members Bilaal Abdullah and Riad Ali to answer the joint indictment with American-born Muslim leader Louis Haneef.

An official of the US Attorney’s Office in Broward County, told Sunday Newsday, that Bakr, Bilaal, and Ali were charged jointly with Haneef for conspiracy to export the weapons to Trinidad in April 1990.

He said the US authorities had great difficulty in getting Bakr, Bilaal, and Ali to be extradited to the United States to face the charges. In fact, no extradition request was ever made for the Trinidadians.

Reason? At the time of the alleged offences, the extradition treaty between Trinidad and Tobago and the United States did not include firearm offences. In the 1990s, persons would have been extradited for murder and narcotics, but not firearms.

The US official said because of this problem, the United States could not proceed to request the extradition of the Muslimeen trio as this would have been deemed an abuse of the process by the court.

Firearm offences were included in an amended Extradition Act in 2004, the official added. "If we now go ahead and seek the extradition of Mr Abu Bakr and the others, we may have great difficulty in trying to convince your judicial officers that after a 14-year delay, we want to put these men on trial in the United States."

The official said the US made a request recently for a Trinidadian Farouk Warris, but he was released by the Trinidad High Court because of a ten-year delay in seeking his extradition. "So you see, the scenario is worse if we now go and seek the request for Mr Abu Bakr."

Haneef, a close associate of Abu Bakr, visited the Mucurapo premises of the Jamaat in 1990, months before the 1990 attempted coup. Months after the Jamaat staged their failed coup, most of the guns recovered from the Red House and TTT were traced as being bought and shipped by Haneef from Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale.

In 1991, Haneef was arrested and charged in Broward County for conspiracy to export a large cache of weapons to Trinidad in April 1990. Warrants of arrest were out for Bakr, Bilaal, and Ali, but they were never brought to trial in the US.

Haneef pleaded guilty and was jailed for four years in a US Federal Prison. He was released in the late 1990s and all exhibits in the case returned to the prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office.

A check with the docket in the court on Friday revealed that as far as the US authorities are concerned, the file is closed.

Bakr led a group of insurgents to TTT on July 27, 1990, while Bilaal headed another group to the Red House where Parliament was in session. The Prime Minister and members of Parliament were held hostage. The insurgents released the hostages and surrendered on August 1, 1990.

Bakr and 113 others were charged with murder, treason and other offences, but they never went to trial because the Port-of-Spain High Court ruled in 1992 that they were recipients of a Presidential amnesty.

However, the Privy Council ruled in 1994 that the amnesty was invalid as the insurgents continued to make fresh demands days after they got the document. They were never rearrested as the Law Lords found it would have been an abuse of process to do so.